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Good news. There is hope for average Americans; not so much for academics.

It’s bad news for the Eco Worriers though who were hoping that constant displays of extreme weather would finally convince conservatives — a flood here, a Cat 6 there, a hottest first Sunday of Lent. It all washes over Conservatives. The weather-porn won’t convince them.

But the most interesting and novel discovery here is buried in the third paragraph from the bottom and barely mentioned. The researchers are only interested in how to “convince conservatives” and not remotely concerned that the media may be misleading a lot of the population by hyping up the weather.

Apparently media propaganda has convinced 40% of the US population that they’ve lived through a drought that didn’t happen and 10% think they’ve lived through a hurricane that wasn’t.

I graphed the differences between perceived events and real ones. Below, red columns show the percentage of people who said they had lived through droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Blue columns show the percentage of those same people who were living in counties which NOAA said had actually experienced those events.

Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.

A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.

Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.

Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as [...]

In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing.

….

In 2016 29% of meteorologists thought climate change was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year.

Figure how this result fits with the idea of the overwhelming evidence and 97% consensus. Which group on the planet after climate scientists should be the second profession to “get it” — how about meteorologists?

After the hottest ever El Nino year with relentless propaganda on Australian media, even a loaded survey finds that only 39% of Australians agree that humans are the major drivers of the climate. The survey is being painted as a success by obedient “journalists”. But this is not skyrocketing support, it’s more likely last gasp noise. The results will be down again next year (with the weather).

It is yet another meaningless motherhood survey that avoids asking real questions, offers unbalanced answers, and uses the same ambiguous language as most of these pointless surveys do. Would you like apple-pie?

Who doesn’t want nicer weather — and for free?

The questions climate fans are too scared to ask

Obviously The Climate Institute don’t want real answers, which they must know would be devastating. They won’t ask how much people want to pay out their own pocket to fix the climate. They won’t ask people to rank “climate change” against all the other issues they care about. They won’t ask people if Climate Change is a scam, a con, or a scheme to make the green industry rich (a year ago a US poll showed 31% were happy to call climate change [...]

This is the devastating question few surveyors are willing to ask. Survey teams usually use mindless motherhood questions instead, like whether we “believe” in climate change. (Who doesn’t?) Or they ask if we want clean energy… (doh, like I want my energy dirty?) But the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research actually did a nationally representative poll of 1097 adults.

Everyone wants a nice climate, but hardly anyone wants to pay for it:

When asked whether they would support a monthly fee on their electric bill to combat climate change, 42 percent of respondents are unwilling to pay even $1. Twenty-nine percent would pay $20, an amount roughly equivalent to what the federal government estimates the damages from climate change would be on each household. And, 20 percent indicate they are willing to pay $50 per month. Party affiliation is the main determinant of how much people are willing to pay, not education, income, or geographic location. Democrats are consistently willing to pay more than Republicans.

The answer has flummoxed people. Sam Ori in the Wall St Journal can’t make sense of it:

Oops! CBC (the Canadian version of the BBC and ABC) have been caught out editing a story to make it more politically correct. CBC’s political bias is accidentally on display. The original message revealed a sacred truth that must not be spoken. How would most Canadians feel about being forced to pay money to change the weather if they knew most other Canadians also thought it was a waste of billions? As far as I can tell, the updated version was a complete rewrite of the first half of the article. There appear to be a lot of changes.

The unsurprising news is that 56% of Canadians are skeptics – which is very similar to all other surveys which show that 62% of Brits are 62% skeptical. As are 54% of Australians. Fully third of the US are so skeptical they think it’s a total hoax.

Another survey that proves Australians still tick “yes” to motherhood statements. (Especially when there is no cost involved, and all choices are “Free”)

Survey shows Aussies’ love and concern for their Great Barrier Reef

A James Cook University researcher has found more than three quarters of Australians regard the Great Barrier Reef as part of their national identity and nearly 90 per cent believe it is under threat from climate change.

But what the media-release doesn’t say is that after 25 years of hearing how the climate apocalypse is coming, people think climate change is going to be slightly worse than beach litter.

In terms of extreme threats, 6% more people think Climate Change will be worse than flotsam and jetsam. As a multibillion dollar marketing campaign endorsed by the UN, WMO, IMF, and western media — that’s got to hurt. Climate change is not much more scary than litter, ships, or runaway fertilizer.

Figure 3: Respondent perceptions of threats to the Great Barrier Reef as scored on a 10-point scale (1=not at all threatening and 10=extremely threatening). The “Top 2%” refers to the percentage of respondents [...]

This study really reinforces how important it is for skeptics to be heard. Just get out there, write letters to the editor, email your MP, and speak up at public events. It does help.

There’s a new long detailed study out struggling with how to keep Climate Fear alive. Oh, the disappointment, exposing people to both sides of the story created more skeptics. The researchers tried all their best angles, like pretending that using expensive energy would “help the economy”, or “free the nation from a dependence on foreign oil”. They tried the religious frame “we’re protecting god’s creation” and they tried what they thought was a nationalist frame (but which was really just another gonzo economic claim dressed up with US-flattery) “Innovative technology will keep our nation’s economy strong”.

Not surprisingly these dud messages don’t work. McCright et al miss the point that if they are selling schemes to change the weather, the best salesman would list the direct benefits — like how much nicer a cooler world will be, with fewer storms and floods, less heatwaves, and more cold days in winter, stuff like that right. (I can’t think why they don’t?) Could it be that no matter [...]

The devastating result of the latest CSIRO survey: 54% of Australians don’t believe the experts at the IPCC, and are not convinced that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. Starkly, only 28% of Liberal voters agree with Malcolm Turnbull. Amazingly 40% of Labor voters and even a quarter of green voters don’t accept the IPCC litany. Presumably they think humans have some effect but are not the major cause.

More importantly, even most of those who believe are not motivated. When it comes to spending money on the environment, 80% of Australians don’t voluntarily do it and 80% don’t care enough to change their vote because of this issue. Despite all the relentless propaganda, despite all the government funded groups being in lock-step, the trends are slowly falling for believers (from 2010-2014), though not “statistically significantly”. (Though longer term studies from 1990 to now show that falling trend).

The survey: CSIRO — Australian attitudes to Climate Change, 2015 PDF

Don’t miss below how a climate science professor reveals that most of the people he knows just follow their political team’s fashions. How telling? Also below, see how the ABC spins this to meaninglessness to support the [...]

How the landscape is shifting. If we give people the right question instead of the usual loaded surveys, they surprise us. Here’s an opinion poll with an outrageously skeptical option: “climate change is a total hoax”.

In March 2015 a Gallup poll on Climate Change suggested that 24% of the US population worried “Not at all”. I called these the “implacable skeptics”. I’d argue now that the implacable skeptic group stands at 31% who agree that it is a “total hoax”.

Has it really grown this much since March? Perhaps the ramp up of the US presidential campaign, with Republican candidates like Trump competing to be openly skeptical [...]

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK (IMechEng) has a new “climate” survey out. It’s good fodder for headlines about fear and worry. But after priming the audience with a litany of climate disasters and asking them if they are worried about “cyclones”, “droughts” and “the future of the human race”, the awful truth is that half of the Brits don’t want to pay anything to stop it.

It’s another motherhood-two-cent-survey, meaning it asks motherhood type questions and gets everyone’s “2 cents” on an issue (and it’s worth both cents). We get insights like finding that 64% think global warming is “already a problem”, but it can’t be that big a deal because 52% of people don’t think they personally should pay more in tax in an effort to do something about it.

No hard questions are asked, no one is forced to rank the worries of life, only the worries of the climate industry. Evidently the surveyors don’t really want to know if people think “climate change” is man-made. Nor do they want to know how much people want to spend attempting to change the weather. Money is only a Yes No type question.

I used to think there was a consensus among government-funded certified climate scientists, but a better study by Verheggen Strengers, Verheegen, and Vringer shows even that is not true.[1] The “97% consensus” is now 43%.

Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty.

More than 1800 international scientists studying various aspects of climate change (including climate physics, climate impacts, and mitigation) responded to the questionnaire. Some 6550 people were invited to participate in this survey, which took place in March and April 2012. Respondents were picked because they had authored articles with the key words ‘global warming’ and/or ‘global climate change’, covering the 1991–2011 period, via the Web of Science, or were included the climate scientist database assembled by Jim Prall, or just by a survey of peer reviewed climate science articles. Prall’s database includes some 200 names that have criticized mainstream science and about half had only published in [...]

I’ve discussed the big ComRes/ITV survey before, which showed that 62% of UK citizens are skeptics and are not convinced that humans are changing the weather. This is the same interesting survey which also showed that the highest proportion of skeptics were in the educated upper middle class, and the lowest was in the unskilled workers and pensioners. I didn’t explain then that this survey also split the groups according to age. So here (finally) are those graphs. Fittingly the young are undecided and the wise are more skeptical. But surprisingly there is a peak believer age, and that’s around 35 – 44. Either this generation has been assailed with more propaganda than any other, or something else is going on.

Is this the beginnings of the youthful revolution? Only 20% 34% of 18 – 24 year olds would be called believers?

They quizzed 2047 people from across the UK early last year and I’ve graphed the results according to age, and the “peak believer” band is clearly visible. In all three questions I colored believers red, and skeptics blue. The undecided are grey.

People generally switch from the “don’t know” category when they are young into the skeptic camp [...]

The IPCC has told us in letters of fire for twenty years that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. But despite the unending propaganda 60% of Australians are not convinced. This fits with other better designed and much larger surveys by CSIRO showing that 53% of the population are skeptical, and a UK study which showed that 63% of British people were skeptical that storms and floods are probably man-made.

The IPSOS polls have been running for years, and are unashamedly pro-IPCC in leaning, but despite that obvious bias, and loaded, ambiguous questions, most Australians don’t agree that it is mainly our fault. The climate is changing but it is mainly or partly natural. IPSOS gloss over that, but if humans are responsible for less than half of “climate change” that makes Direct Action twice as useless. If natural forces caused more of the recent warming, that also reduces the scary projections.

The IPSOS Climate Change Report 2015 (Online poll, 1,063 people)

Q3: Which best describes your opinion about the causes of climate change?

Only 40% of Australians accept the IPCC position that mankind is the main cause of climate change (orange and red). | Click [...]

The X-Gens will be the maximal climate believers. The worm is turning with an uptick in skeptical thinking coming from the late-Millennials (born after 1994) who are just now starting to reach a voting age*. This group was raised on climate dogma and relentless propaganda, and the age-old rebellion of youth is starting to kick in. The big-scare-campaign may have missed its moment; it’s been pushed too hard for too long. Not only have the PDO and other natural cycles rolled into unfriendly cooler-wetter zones, but the generational wheel is rolling too.

It used to be that the older the survey group, the more skeptical it was. Youth are easily fooled by passion and namecalling. But new evidence suggests the rebellion factor is kicking in: 20% of 18-20 year olds in the US are implacable skeptics, and 23% are unconvinced. After twenty years of propaganda 55% of the generation “believe”, and only 12% are passionate. More of the same is not going to increase that. There is real hope here.

Data comes from Harvard Public Opinion Project. (PDF, currently not publicly available)

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H/t GWPF

Harvard Political Review “For Young Voters, Climate Change Takes a Back Seat“